Why do people get stuck on airplanes?
Today's Wall Street Journal tries to answer the question, "Why do nightmare airline delays happen? It's position? The WSJ pins much of the blame on airline reluctance to cancel business, FAA policies restricting pilot hours and first-come first-served air traffic control rules. I think they are overthinking the problem, though. There's an obvious reason that airline service continues to decline that no one wants to talk about:
Most high-ranking government officials and executives don't fly commercially any more.
Security in the post-September 11 world gave corporate CEOs and their staffs a convenient excuse to bypass commercial aviation in favor of private jets. Congress members and administration officials have been using private jets paid for by lobbyists for most of the last decade. And very wealthy individuals haven't flown commercially for ages -- as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, some of them have children who, when forced to fly commercially, just sit down and cry in the middle of the airport. Frankly, we all have wished we could do that at some point in our lives.
Now in the olden days, when an airline screwed up the itineraries of half the executive suite of GM or P&G, corporate travel offices would threaten to change their preferred vendor list of carriers. Therefore, a JetBlue or Northwest had huge incentives to fix their operations -- or else suffer huge losses. But now, with "the people who count" flying private, few corporate travel offices even bother to complain to their carrier. Airlines aren't truly mission-critical for them any more.
So if corporate executives aren't the proxies for the everyday flying public that they used to be, what can the airlines do? Well, they can start by eating their own dog food. Assign executives to fly the line routinely, arm them with free drink coupons and trip vouchers, and have them firefight issues they see. When they share the service experience with their customers, they'll have a lot of suggestions on how to do better. And if airlines were to honestly document and publicize those experiences, they could create good publicity and marketing buzz far beyond anything they could buy.
Airline executives may not be Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, but they could do worse than to emulate his leadership in bringing Chrysler back from near-bankrupcy. As Iococca once said, "We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems." Airline executives aren't going to find those opportunities sitting in the home office. It's time for them to go looking for them.
Most high-ranking government officials and executives don't fly commercially any more.
Security in the post-September 11 world gave corporate CEOs and their staffs a convenient excuse to bypass commercial aviation in favor of private jets. Congress members and administration officials have been using private jets paid for by lobbyists for most of the last decade. And very wealthy individuals haven't flown commercially for ages -- as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, some of them have children who, when forced to fly commercially, just sit down and cry in the middle of the airport. Frankly, we all have wished we could do that at some point in our lives.
Now in the olden days, when an airline screwed up the itineraries of half the executive suite of GM or P&G, corporate travel offices would threaten to change their preferred vendor list of carriers. Therefore, a JetBlue or Northwest had huge incentives to fix their operations -- or else suffer huge losses. But now, with "the people who count" flying private, few corporate travel offices even bother to complain to their carrier. Airlines aren't truly mission-critical for them any more.
So if corporate executives aren't the proxies for the everyday flying public that they used to be, what can the airlines do? Well, they can start by eating their own dog food. Assign executives to fly the line routinely, arm them with free drink coupons and trip vouchers, and have them firefight issues they see. When they share the service experience with their customers, they'll have a lot of suggestions on how to do better. And if airlines were to honestly document and publicize those experiences, they could create good publicity and marketing buzz far beyond anything they could buy.
Airline executives may not be Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, but they could do worse than to emulate his leadership in bringing Chrysler back from near-bankrupcy. As Iococca once said, "We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems." Airline executives aren't going to find those opportunities sitting in the home office. It's time for them to go looking for them.
Technorati Tags: Airlines, Customer Service, Marketing, Public Relations, Private jets
posted by Carl Howe at
9:57 AM
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